January 2008 Web Server Survey

In the January 2008 survey we received responses from 155,583,825 sites, reflecting a much slower growth of only 354 thousand sites, compared with last month, where the increase was 5.4 million.

Apache continues its recovery after steep falls in share over the last eighteen months and is back over 50%. Its share had been negatively affected over that period by the increasing number of blog sites in the survey on large providers like Microsoft and Google, using their own server software. But it is also benefiting from growth at other blog providers like multiply.

There has been significant growth in recent months for some newer entrants to the survey. While lighttpd's share, particularly of active sites, has stagnated, there has been good growth for nginx (an open-source web server developed in Russia), which passes 0.5% of the web server market this month. There is also good growth for LiteSpeed, a commercial web server designed as a high-performance drop-in replacement for Apache, which passes 400,000 hostnames this month (partly due to its use by blogging provider WordPress.com.

A more detailed list of servers is given here.